The Fortunate Mistake

I was getting a belated start on my weekly blog post and stopped to look up the mission statement for the Midwest Writing Center, my favorite not-for-profit organization.

I expected to find the following the simple sentence:

Fostering the appreciation of the written word and supporting its creators.

Instead, I found a nice photo of a bunch of kids, probably some middle-schoolers from a recent summer-camp-style workshop, with this displayed underneath:

Fostering the appreciation of the writeen word and supporting its creators.

My first thought, “Ugh, typo alert. They should fix that.”

Then I took a minute, looked at it again, and began to appreciate the cleverness of that particular misspelling. Especially in the context of a group of young people.

By entering one T and two Es instead of two Ts and one E, the word transformed to something new and exciting. A few misplaced keystrokes produced a superior caption for that photo.

It put “teen” into the writing picture.

After all, getting young folks into writing was the whole focus of the Midwest Writing Center’s YEW Middle School Camp and Young Emerging Writers Summer Internship Program.

Sometimes typos and other artistic mistakes have to be appreciated and savored for the subconscious gifts they are.

“Totally cool,” in oldie speak.

In other words, “Awesome.”